Albert Elm was one of our Students Of The Month way back in March, having wowed us with his incredible eye for detail and canny ability to capture moments of intrigue that abate the mundanity of everyday life. What was most impressive about Albert’s work was how new to photography he was. Even among our plethora of talented students Albert’s work stood out immediately for it’s obvious skill. Now that a few months have passed he’s a tiny bit more experienced but his skill is no less impressive.

Albert’s just updated us with a selection of new images captured on a winter journey through Siberia and China, travelling with Magnum photographer Jacob Aue Sobol, who he assisted for two years prior to beginning his studies. Albert’s images capture the essence of the places he’s passing through with the eyes of an outsider, embracing the strangeness of these alien lands in his careful compositional and tonal decisions. As a result you leave his images with the impression that China and Russia are innately pink and hazy, bathed in the rosy glow of a traveller’s impressionable eyes.

In Albert’s words “It’s about the essence of our moments and the feel of certain places and situations more than depicting them for what they are – the odd in the supposedly banal. I want to show some twisted parts of life that trigger a feeling of curiosity and a desire to ask questions.”

“Usually the model is freezing on shoots… this time it was the other way around,” says photographer Mirka Laura Severa on her latest project for SZ Magazin. Asked to concept a fashion shoot for down jackets, Mirka looked for an unusual way to showcase the products, and came up with the idea to use snowmen as models. The result is a hilarious series of images depicting well-dressed snowpeople frolicking, posing and taking selfies in a winter wonderland.

Brooklyn-based photographer Roe Ethridge has become known for exploring the fake and plastic nature of photography and in his work he often adapts existing images by adding new interpretations of reality or shoots highly stylised images inspired by classical compositions.

In 1982, distinguished photographer David Bailey published NW1 a photographic series of fading areas of London which David had inhabited for almost 30 years. As the iconic and recognisable buildings closed their doors, the photographer famed for his portraits, pointed his lens towards the decaying architectural beauty.

We tend not to notice stuff until something’s wrong with it. How aware are you of the lights in your house until a bulb goes out? When was the last time you thought about your pancreas? Flaws, problems and incongruities are what make us conscious of a thing’s existence. Without aberration, we don’t just lose our sense of normal, we lose our sense entirely.